Tuesday, June 13, 2006

the privacy divide

I've been known to fetishize my privacy. I can't deny it. I visibly flinch when the checker at Safeway says, "Did you find everything you need, Mrs. Marshall?" instead of "Can I help you with those bags, Mrs. Glenn?" (For those of you who don't know, at Safeway, I'm Mrs. John Glenn, the proud, straight-spined, Tang-buying astronaut's wife.) They know because I've purchased Mrs. Glenn's groceries with Ms. Marshall's credit card. Damn those giant Medjool dates! Food is such an expensive vice. And now Safeway knows exactly what I buy and they'll swap the data with Netflix so they can correlate it with the movies I rent.

Jonathan Zittrain himself wouldn't have to do this, of course. It's very clear he's one to watch. His own reputation looks to be on a sharply upward trajectory. An eBay red shooting star, so to speak. He may even be able to sell or swap his reputation on eBay; it's safe to say I couldn't afford to snipe on a reputation like that.

Y'know, I can't remember how things fit together, but he variously referred to:

He talked about redaction too, but I seem to have blanked it out. (My own impression is that we've begun to hide things in plain sight, and it's pretty darned effective.)

I wish I could remember the line that connected all these dots. As Pee-Wee Herman would have it: "Connect the dots. La-la-la-la. Connect the dots. La-la-la-la." And all I can think of is how Casey Kasem was on the KHJ Boss Radio line-up after the Real Don Steele. Or was that Robert W. Morgan? That's surely not part of the argument, is it? Why did KHJ have a Boss 30 and KRLA a Top 40?

A side point: Pronouncing the acronym GUI as "gooey" and talking about mash-ups starts getting pretty silly. That's gooey mash-ups. Then you add a couple of protocols and you've got soapy gooey mash-ups. Which can be cleaned up with AJAX. This is why I've drifted away from CS. I can't talk about these things with a straight face.

I'm the slowest blogger around. That's because I get transcluded in the gooey mash-ups.